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Check out the helmet that pilots of the F-35 are going to wear. It has two built in 1280×1024 projectors that reflect off the visor.

This morning Bruce Schneier posted a fascinating article on the psychology and economics of buying bad products. The example that he uses is a “secure” USB keychain drive called Secustick that was, supposedly, commissioned by the French government, tested and approved by a French intelligence service, and is apparently in use all over the world by governments and major corporations in the financial services industries.

A week ago a review of the Secustick was posted on Tweakers.net. They loaded the software on the stick into a debugger and learned that all someone had to do was place a breakpoint after a function called VerifyPassWord(), alter the return code from a 0 to a 1, and voilà! (Pun intended.) Anybody could get access to the contents of the drive.

It’s generally my belief that the free market is efficient. However, Bruce’s essay brings up a good point. Shoddy products like the Secustick have an advantage in the marketplace. Namely, they cost less to produce. Normally this isn’t an issue because the consumer has the skillset and the ability to evaluate that the clothing they are buying from Walmart isn’t as high a quality as what they would buy from JC Penney’s. How are you supposed to know when it comes to something like the Secustick? Or a firewall? Or a virus scanner? Or a <insert any suitably complicated technology>?

This afternoon I had the pleasure of seeing Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters.  It is, quite possibly, the greatest cinematic achievement in human history.

I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but since I know some people who didn’t wait until after the credits when they saw X-Men III, make certain that you wait until the credits are over.

Do you think I would fit in a Mini Cooper?

A few days ago I posted this link to a piece by Scott Adams questioning whether violating someones copyright is theft. Yesterday Poncelet took the opportunity to post a reply. The really amusing thing for me is that Adams had already posted a response. According to Adams the first piece was an experiment in generating cognitive dissonance in the responses. One of my favorite examples of cognitive dissonance from Poncelet’s post:

When you “buy” these underpants, some of that money goes to the person who designed them. The rest goes to the company that mass-produced them and the company that shipped them. Some of that money finds its way to entities who are preparing to sue you for wearing your underpants improperly.

In other words:

1. Money from album sales goes towards the labels and the RIAA who might sue me.
2. When I violate copyright I’m stealing from the artist who created the music.
3. It’s okay because I’m hurting the labels and the RIAA worse than the artist.

As I mentioned before, my favorite April Fool’s day prank was the 8-bit tie available at ThinkGeek. Turns out that they are going to make it after all:

Hey! You! Quit emailing us to make this for REAL already ; ) We promise, we’ll make it. In fact we are already working on it. You’ve just forced our hand! Click the ‘email me when available’ link above to get notified! Thanks! I guess the joke is on us this year :p

While I’m certainly appreciative that I grew up in a time of Transformers, Voltron, Robotech, etc … I’ve started looking at the toys that are available to my son. You know what, we were gipped.

Exhibit A, the Dinosaur Easter Basket pictured above. I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up all we ever got was the gender neutral ones made out of twigs and straw.

Exhibit B, Lego Star Wars Death Star, Imperial Star Destroyer, and Millenium Falcon. Girl Plankton doesn’t buy my excuse that purchasing them would be an investment. I’ve tried convincing her that they would be an investment in our children’s geek credentials. That didn’t go over as well as I had hoped. Subsequently, I tried convincing her that they would be collectors items which could be exchanged for large sums of money upon acceptance of our children into Ivy League institutions. To her credit she pointed out that I wouldn’t be allowed to remove them from the packaging if that was the case.

Exhibit C, Toys R Us has a Robots Category on their website. Completely glossing over the fact that when I was young the only two options for shopping at Toys R Us were waiting for the catalog to come with the Sunday paper, or go to the store with the folks. Nowadays all you have to do is bookmark the Robots Category on their website. How effing cool is that?

I think it’s painfully clear to everybody how badly we were screwed. We had Easter Baskets, but not fuzzy dinosaur ones. We had Legos, but the most you could hope to create was a tower or a bridge. Sometimes you had most of the necessary pieces to put together a helicopter or an airplane. Nobody had gone to the trouble of putting together a kit to build a Death Star with them. We had plenty of robot toys, but we didn’t have such convenient methods of shopping for them. Our only option was to beg our parents to drive us to the store. Even then we were at the mercy of the clerks who stocked the shelves. Maybe they had Roy Focker’s VF-1 that you saved for months to buy. Chances were that you were going to have to settle for that Zentraedia Battle Pod because it was the last one on the shelf. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Of course, it could have been worse. All our father’s had had to play with when they were kids was fire and the wheel.